Facebook wants your past, present, and future on Open Graphs and Timelines

Facebook is rearranging itself so users can connect a huge number of apps and …

Facebook will soon allow its users to integrate all of their music, media, and lifestyle actions and interactions with their profiles, Mark Zuckerberg announced at Facebook’s f8 conference today. Connecting profiles to services like Spotify will allow users to fill out their own curated “Timeline,” so friends can see each others’ media activities both as individuals and aggregated over their entire network, a move that will explode the amount of content on the site.

The new arrangement is part of two new Facebook initiatives, one of which is the Timeline. Users can fill in their Timelines with both content pulled in from other services—say, an article “liked” on Ars Technica or a game played—as well as “real world” activities like photos or status updates. The real world content can be filtered by date into the timeline, so users can fill in their backstory on the site with everything that happened before Facebook existed: moves to a new city, first words as a baby, or every single relationship breakup pre-2004.

Once in place, the timeline will be the new News Feed, with friends’ updates streaming past. But not everything will make it into the Timeline: small updates, like what music friends are listening to, may be relegated to the Ticker, the integrated online friends/status update bar rolled out Wednesday. Users will be able to choose which activities are significant enough to appear in their timelines.

Zuckerberg also placed emphasis on the new use of verbs in timelines, which will allow people to sort their friends activities in different ways. For instance, with a status update reading “Casey Johnston is watching Veronica Mars for the millionth time,” users will be able to click both “watching” to see what else friends are viewing at the moment, or "Veronica Mars" to see a list of other friends who like Veronica Mars.

These updates will feed into the second new feature, Facebook Open Graph, which collects and ranks the the activities or items that friends are interacting with. Apps that integrate with Facebook will be sorted in Open Graph based on popularity with a user and his or her friends, including Spotify, Hulu, Netflix, Foodspotting, Vevo, and Nike+, among many others. Open Graph is intended to help with app discoverability, showing users what their friends are doing without flooding their feeds every time a friend kills a mobster or plants a new crop of corn.

When Timeline was introduced, Chris Cox, director of product at Facebook, noted that “there is nothing we love to summarize more than time itself,” stating that with the new features it would be possible for users to create months or years in review.

Of course, Facebook’s entire motivation isn’t just for friends to become more intimate with each others’ past and present. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, spoke briefly at the conference, and noted that “because our [Spotify’s] playlists are social, they [users] are more engaged. And because they are engaged, they are more than twice as likely to pay for music.” For Spotify, which boasted 2 million paying members worldwide as of Wednesday, the exposure to the better part of a billion Facebook members could mean big bucks.

The new completionist Facebook is a significant departure from what Facebook’s most avid competitors, Google+ and Twitter, currently offer on their sites. If Facebook can get users to buy into putting their whole life histories on the site, the amount of content there will explode, and create an investment and representation of self users won’t be likely to abandon. And with more content comes more opportunities to target ads.

The beta for Facebook’s timelines begins today, with availability being rolled out gradually. Neither Zuckerberg nor any of the speakers mentioned a timeline for the new version, but we expect it will be sooner rather than later.

Casey Johnston / Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics.

95 Reader Comments

Shouldn't this raise alarm bells with Congress if they had issues with Google? I would think so. Anyway, I'm sure this is an interesting business model for Facebook and I'm sure no one really thought carefully about privacy rights when they built this.

Shouldn't this raise alarm bells with Congress if they had issues with Google? I would think so. Anyway, I'm sure this is an interesting business model for Facebook and I'm sure no one really thought carefully about privacy rights when they built this.

I don't see the connection? All they are doing is essentially creating a new view on every comment, like, dislike, update and pic upload (etc...) you have made on Facebook and giving you a way of adding a pre-Facebook history to it.

Its either information they already have or stuff your willfully adding to it. I would assume your current privacy settings affect this, but perhaps they will need to add a setting just for this feature... as usual, the devil is in the privacy setting details.

I still haven't gotten over facebook's repeated demands that I add my cell phone to my account every time I use it to login. Even that seems like a horrible idea. I can't really fault them for it though. Their business model depends on extracting as much information as possible from as many people as possible as efficiently as possible. I just find it unnerving and will continue to resist them whenever possible while still making some use of their service. Of course if they tried to _require_ something like this or do it automatically I would delete my profile on the spot.

Everybody in my friends list is already pissed off with the new changes, I can't see these additional changes are going to make them any happier. We don't mind saying hello and BS'ing, but having our entire lifes history scrolling past on a ticker is way too much. I agree this should raise alarm bells in Washington in regards to online privacy, Facebook is basically telling everyone here that your life story is open for the taking.

This really doesn't work for me from a social perspective. I like talking to people, I meet, learning about them and developing a relationship. I want to learn about them sitting around the kitchen table or in a cafe. I want to tell my story in my own words, not a biography stapled together out of throwaway comments.

I know I'm yet another person saying "omg, account baleted!" but this is my line in the sand. All I actually want is a communications tool and I have plenty of alternatives

How dumb are some of these comments? Facebook isn't creating any new information, it's simply making it easier to scrub through your profile history. It's just information that's already there in your profile!

This has been one of my complaints about Facebook for a long time: all my activity for the past 5 years is buried in history and I have no way of accessing it. The only option you currently have to scroll to the bottom of your profile and click "older posts" over and over again, until you slowly crawl into your (very recent) history. All your older history is deep in an abyss, and you have no way of practically accessing it.

This timeline feature is *exactly* what I've wanted for so long. It solves the history problem completely, and it's just a feature that should have been there from the start. All you ignorant techophobes need to calm down and look at the technology problem that's being solved instead of freaking out about being scared of change.

Eh, it's not all that terribly easy for them to pull it all together to have a single file for each person. Stores may have your complete shopping history with them. Web site advertisers may know the sites you like to visit. Survey companies might have deep dives on the few people they interview. But a single list of everything, available to anyone that can afford it? That's like the holy grail of marketing demographics! I'm sure there are a lot of people in marketing wetting themselves in delight over this.

I bailed on that creepy website months ago. Between wanting cell phone numbers, facial recognition, and now this... they've become the intrusive web stalker that knows everything about you and many of the people you know.

Ten years ago, people would have been outraged at this sort of stuff being placed on the Internet. It's creepy and incredibly dangerous!

I would love to imagine the perfect criminal element to this. Want to break into someones house or maybe stalk the perfect love of your life that's ignorant of their love for you ? Just hope on to Facebook everything is layed out in nice charts you could probability find out weekly habits , places they visit. times when someones just alone, ect...

The sad part of all of this is in 6 months, people won't even remember complaining about it in the first place. This happens every time Facebook does a site revamp. I remember people were outraged when the first news feed came out, and now that is central to what people think about when they think about facebook. Who remembers when people were mad that any of your posts could be turned into ads? Now, it seems normal. This is why I haven't updated my Facebook profile in years (It's useful to keep for when people send out event invites...)

Shouldn't this raise alarm bells with Congress if they had issues with Google? I would think so. Anyway, I'm sure this is an interesting business model for Facebook and I'm sure no one really thought carefully about privacy rights when they built this.

If you have to volunteer the information to Facebook why is this a legal issue?

I believe people should have a right to privacy but I don't believe I should be told what I can and can't share especially if it's my own personal information.

Honestly, if it wasn't Facebook behind this (basically a bunch of crazy assholes) and there was no thing like Patriot Act or 9/11 (basically no government trying to know everything about us) this would be an amazing feature. It would help you remember where and when shit happened, you could see places you've been, and we could even see things like, "I used to do that" in a way like "Oh those days. I miss it when I used to be able to do this and that" after seeing "at work" for monday through Friday.

Basically, you can review your lifestyle with this I think. People such as Google would be able to see "Okay, a shitload of people were here, maybe this is where an outbreak started" (think Contagion if they had this). It opens up a shitload of possibilites.

But unfortunately, the first sentence is not real and we live in a world where government wants to know everything about us and Facebook wants to sell our private information to people. So fuck it.

How dumb are some of these comments? Facebook isn't creating any new information, it's simply making it easier to scrub through your profile history. It's just information that's already there in your profile!

This has been one of my complaints about Facebook for a long time: all my activity for the past 5 years is buried in history and I have no way of accessing it. The only option you currently have to scroll to the bottom of your profile and click "older posts" over and over again, until you slowly crawl into your (very recent) history. All your older history is deep in an abyss, and you have no way of practically accessing it.

This timeline feature is *exactly* what I've wanted for so long. It solves the history problem completely, and it's just a feature that should have been there from the start. All you ignorant techophobes need to calm down and look at the technology problem that's being solved instead of freaking out about being scared of change.

I would argue that the sort of things that are worthy of being posted on facebook are not things that most people would care to have a record of later. And finding new relationships within existing data, which they are most certainly doing here (at least from the perspective of anyone without access to all of their databases) does constitute generating new information. You certainly _sound_ like the ignorant one making statements like you did, however I think I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and interpret that last sentence as "I work for facebook".

For the people on this thread who already hate Facebook, this isn't going to change anything, they will continue to hate Facebook.

For people who actually use the site.... this is just a revamp of your wall. The wall was dull and boring, now it's presented in a prettier, more easily navigable format. While I'm not going to go and add any more information to my profile, it's pretty nice to see everything I've added to site in this new format.

This timeline feature is *exactly* what I've wanted for so long. It solves the history problem completely, and it's just a feature that should have been there from the start. All you ignorant techophobes need to calm down and look at the technology problem that's being solved instead of freaking out about being scared of change.

I would argue that the sort of things that are worthy of being posted on facebook are not things that most people would care to have a record of later. And finding new relationships within existing data, which they are most certainly doing here (at least from the perspective of anyone without access to all of their databases) does constitute generating new information. You certainly _sound_ like the ignorant one making statements like you did, however I think I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and interpret that last sentence as "I work for facebook".

How is it remotely ignorant to ask others to be open-minded about something? In my opinion it was inevitable for personal journaling to hit the Internet, and Facebook is simply a logical choice. This is electronic journaling at a scale nobody ever thought possible, and you can do it without even thinking about it. Are the privacy concerns enormous? Yes, but let's figure out what they are now. If it wasn't Facebook exploiting the data it would be someone else, and Facebook is sufficiently public that it's an easy target when privacy concerns do arise.

I am already annoyed that so many websites can read the facebook cookies and ask me to link my account to their site. Facebook needs to back off and provide more privacy options before they expand all this invasive info mining.

This timeline feature is *exactly* what I've wanted for so long. It solves the history problem completely, and it's just a feature that should have been there from the start. All you ignorant techophobes need to calm down and look at the technology problem that's being solved instead of freaking out about being scared of change.

I would argue that the sort of things that are worthy of being posted on facebook are not things that most people would care to have a record of later. And finding new relationships within existing data, which they are most certainly doing here (at least from the perspective of anyone without access to all of their databases) does constitute generating new information. You certainly _sound_ like the ignorant one making statements like you did, however I think I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and interpret that last sentence as "I work for facebook".

How is it remotely ignorant to ask others to be open-minded about something? In my opinion it was inevitable for personal journaling to hit the Internet, and Facebook is simply a logical choice. This is electronic journaling at a scale nobody ever thought possible, and you can do it without even thinking about it. Are the privacy concerns enormous? Yes, but let's figure out what they are now. If it wasn't Facebook exploiting the data it would be someone else, and Facebook is sufficiently public that it's an easy target when privacy concerns do arise.

He claimed no new information was being created so I pointed out why that's not true. He resorted to using a straw-man by claiming previous posters were acting shocked about the new functionality, which requires either ignorance or the assumption of ignorance on the part of others, which itself often constitutes ignorance.

It's also ignorant to assume anyone will take you seriously when you call them ignorant. I'll admit I shouldn't have stooped to his level. I'll also note that nowhere in the aforementioned post did he _ask_ anyone to do anything.

How dumb are some of these comments? Facebook isn't creating any new information, it's simply making it easier to scrub through your profile history. It's just information that's already there in your profile!

This has been one of my complaints about Facebook for a long time: all my activity for the past 5 years is buried in history and I have no way of accessing it. The only option you currently have to scroll to the bottom of your profile and click "older posts" over and over again, until you slowly crawl into your (very recent) history. All your older history is deep in an abyss, and you have no way of practically accessing it.

This timeline feature is *exactly* what I've wanted for so long. It solves the history problem completely, and it's just a feature that should have been there from the start. All you ignorant techophobes need to calm down and look at the technology problem that's being solved instead of freaking out about being scared of change.

I would argue that the sort of things that are worthy of being posted on facebook are not things that most people would care to have a record of later. And finding new relationships within existing data, which they are most certainly doing here (at least from the perspective of anyone without access to all of their databases) does constitute generating new information. You certainly _sound_ like the ignorant one making statements like you did, however I think I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and interpret that last sentence as "I work for facebook".

Your argument is incorrect. It might be that you place no value on what you put on Facebook, but that's not universal.

Looking at the new timeline, there aren't any new "relationships" between data I could make out. Care to explain what you're talking about?

Bahaha I'm so glad I deleted my FB before they started facial scanning and graphing everyone's lives. For reals. This shit is plan B for when we've finally had enough NSA warrentless patriot games. "Oh we can't legally spy on you? Ok.. Zuckerburg, we want to buy some of your dataz..."

Seriously. Give live facial recognition camera infrastructure a few more years to mature, and they got their database pre-tagged and bagged for them. Facebook is a surveillance state's wet dream. The best part is, they don't have to lift a finger, its all done for them.